Lemmy is booming

I have never before received so many reactions and comments on my Lemmy posts before, so it’s obvious to see, that there are many new members here.
Welcome to all the new! And I’m looking forward to see more of you here.
Cheers!

  • tmpodA
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    1 year ago

    Yes, by quite a margin as well, I believe. It’s unfortunate, and the only solution is to make diverse instances and advertise them well :) The fediverse is better if the load is more evenly distributed across instances instead of having most users sit on a couple of instances.

    • Cosmiiko@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      For what it’s worth, having a few “bigger” instances means less confusion for users who don’t completely understand federation yet but still want to make the switch. I wouldn’t call it a bad thing, they can always turn to another smaller instance later on.

      • tmpodA
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        1 year ago

        Sure, that is a valid concern, but maybe that could also be mitigated by making it pretty clear that you can interact with content on other servers just fine, even if you’re not from there. Perhaps a little note banner on the “Join Lemmy” page itself.

        Regarding moving to another instance, that is not quite possible right now. There’s no way to properly move an account to another server, you’d just have to start from scratch with a new identity. In the future, it would be nice to have proper account migration, or at the very least a way to import/export account data.

        • Cosmiiko@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          You’re right, a few additions / changes to the Join Lemmy page would indeed go a long way.
          Regarding account migration, I’m fairly certain it’ll be implemented in the future if the project lives on long enough.

    • Neuromancer@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      It will happen over time. Lemmy and Beehaw are still infinitesimally small compared to reddit. Trying to push people onto other servers right now is extreme premature optimization.

      • tmpodA
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        1 year ago

        The issue is that the “first move” advantage is quite real and the momentum gained by lemmy.ml and beehaw.org can easily dwarf diversity on the network. Of course you don’t have to aggressively spread people out, but maybe the spotlight should be fairer, so to speak.

        • Neuromancer@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          Can you explain what the issue is? I think it’s all but inevitable that one server will become the “default” server that most people will create an account on first. As they learn more about how everything works, they may choose to create another account on a server with different rules that suite them better. That flow seems much easier to me than putting pressure on new users to pick the “right” server from them off the bat.

          • tmpodA
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            1 year ago

            I agree, there’s no need to pressure users. But there’s also a lot of room for improvement and for a better onboarding flow. We shouldn’t just settle with the current page and on the idea that people will later migrate their account. Some other commenter was talking about a sort of wizard, to filter instances based on interests and other factors, while anlther mentioned rotating registrations, and I think those are great ideas! They would make the process easier and more intuitive, also allowing the users to be more evenly distributed across the network, in a more “invisible” way to the user. Would help the user and the network alike.

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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      1 year ago

      I have a small, new instance, and I’m not really sure how to advertise it to the lemmy-verse. Do we have a good place to put our instances and what communities we’re hosting?

      • tmpodA
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        1 year ago

        Hey, welcome! Thank you for your contribution to the network :D

        As for discoverability, it is a problem yet to be properly solved. For now, I’d suggest making a launch post and share your communities in the many posts that have recently popped around (e.g https://lemmy.pt/post/36126)

        • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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          1 year ago

          Yeah that’s what I’ve been doing so far, for new users it’s pretty clear why they’re mostly just hanging out in lemmy.ml. Getting the word out about outside communities is a bit difficult, but hopeful. I’m viewing all of this as a perfect “Reddit gave Lemmy a window to view painpoints and minimize them before a larger exodus”. I don’t think we’ll see anything like the migration from Digg, but I see a lot of people who will be open to alternatives if Reddit goes through with this end of month. Right now it’s “How do we funnel them” when they drop the hammer.

          • tmpodA
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            1 year ago

            The time you see a system’s weakness most clearly is definitely when stressing it in a real scenario. The goal is to improve further each time we get an influx of users :)